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e-commerce giant Amazon has inaugurated its new campus in Hyderabad. This is Amazon’s single largest building in the world in terms of total area, that will have the capacity to house 15,000 employees in India. The campus is spread over 9.5 acres of land, with 1.8 million sq ft in office space. This unit is also the only Amazon-owned campus outside the United States.

Amazon vice president of Global Real Estate and Facilities John Schoettler said “We have eight buildings in Hyderabad with 4 million sq ft of office space. We are going to be migrating some of the employees out of some of those facilities (to the new campus). So far as of today, we moved around 4,500 to the (new campus). The building can hold – at any given point of time – 15,000 people,”. Schoettler also mentioned that Amazon had laid the foundation stone for the campus building on March 30, 2016. An average of 2,000 workers were on the site every day for 39 months to construct the building, spending 18 million man-hours. The company has taken care of sustainability while designing the new facility. The campus has more than 300 trees with three specimen trees aged over 200 years and has an 850,000- litre water recycling plant

This is a reflection of Amazon’s focus on talent in India, where the company already has has over 62,000 full-time employees. Senior VP and country manager Amit Agarwal said “It (Hyderabad campus) is also the largest technology base outside Seattle (Amazon’s headquarters). The employees (in Hyderabad) include software development engineers, machine learning scientists, product managers, finance and many other
functions,”

Amit said it has already announced $5 billion investments in India, and another $500 million in food and retail. “We continue to invest across all over businesses,” he added. He also said that the company had launched its Global Selling programme in India a few years ago that allows small and medium businesses in the country to sell to customers in other countries.”What we have seen is while we have 500,000 sellers in the marketplace selling nationally, for exports already we have 50,000 signed up. We have 140 million items that are available on Amazon.com in the global marketplaces. The cumulative exports so far since launch has crossed $1 billion and in the next three years, it is expected to go 5 times to $5 billion,” he said.